Bedrockgames
Legend
I
Every time I need to weed through several sentences to get one highly relevant fact, that slows down my combats, contributes to breaking of immersion as the GM or player mumbles, "waitaminnit, it was right here somewhere..." and all that.
There's a balance to be struck, between making the text engaging, and making it useful at game runtime. It is by no means an easy balance to strike.
one can easily put the relevant pieces of data into the state block. The issue is how much elaboration is there in the text. For me, the elaboration is worth any look up time with spells or monsters. But then I tend to make a point of being familiar with monsters or spells before using them in a session. The 4e approach leaves me genuinely unresponsive as a reader, player and GM. It may well work for some and have a convenience factor. For me it loses too much. That doesn't mean things have to be gygaxian. 2e and 3e did a fine job explaining things without trying to sound like Gary. I would rather the writers have a clear style of their own than mimic his prose.